Ramification
by punchkicker15
Summary: AU Summer between Season Six and Season Seven: Seeing Red never happened, and Willow's sticking with her magic sobriety. But that doesn't mean Willow and Tara's relationship is a bed of roses.


Willow takes another sip of her instant mocha, and regrets it thirty seconds later. There's a weird almond aftertaste that lingers on her tongue long after the chocolate and coffee flavors are gone.

She drums her fingers on the kitchen table and stares at the laptop, waiting for an email from the law firm she's working for. Maybe when she's done with her work for the day, she and Tara can swing by the Espresso Pump and grab a real mocha to make up for this sorry substitute she's drinking now.

An email from Charlie pops up on the screen. _Rosenberg, you're a fucking rock star. There are maybe five people in the world with the technical chops to find those docs, and the judgment to understand their cumulative significance in this case. Take the rest of the day off and have some fun. You've earned it._ Willow's face flushes. She can't remember the last time she did something exceptional and got praised for it. The only big moments in her life lately have been big mistakes.

She hears footsteps on the stairs, and turns to see Tara. Tara's eyes are a bit more heavy-lidded than usual, a sure sign that she's just woken up. She glances at the laptop, and her sleepy expression morphs to one of concern. "Were you up all night working?"

Willow smiles. "No, just since 2 am. The client had an emergency hearing at 8 am New York time, and I just helped Charlie catch the plaintiff's star witness in a lie-"

Tara tilts her head upward, as if pleading for the Goddess for patience.

The gesture jolts Willow right out of her proud excitement, so she stops talking and waits to hear what she's done wrong this time. (And really, did she honestly think Tara would care about the technical finesse involved in finding the documents? What an incredibly boring thing to be proud of.)

Tara says, "That means you got three hours of sleep last night. And that's the third time this week. Sweetie, in case you didn't hear me the first thousand times, this job is going to kill you, and you need to quit."

There's something oddly familiar that phrase-oh, yeah.

 _The pulsing music at the Bronze, or the rhythm of her dancing, sets her head throbbing again. Everything around her feels faded and distant compared with the intensity of the headache. All she wants is some aspirin. She and Tara sit down at the table across from Buffy._

 _Buffy smiles sympathetically. "Poor Will. Still getting those headaches?"_

 _Willow tries to keep up a cheerful facade. "Fewer and further between, but...yep, they're still exercising their visitation rights."_

 _Tara says, "Honey, in case you didn't hear me the first six thousand times, no more teleportation spells."_

 _The words rankle; it's like there's no room for Willow to have_ _ **heard**_ _Tara, but to also disagree with her. There's no room for Willow to choose to push herself to the limit for a good reason. Back at the hospital, the teleportation spell saved the world._

 _But there are more important issues than Willow's annoyance. Willow says, "Well, it's just we have squat in the way of Glory-fighting arsenal, and-another run-in with her and my headaches and nosebleeds are gonna be the least of our problems."_

"If you didn't hear me the first six thousand times" rankles just as much in the present as it did in the past, but Willow's not sure it's something she can bring up without starting a fight. _If you don't want to fight, you don't fight._

She swallows her annoyance, and says, "We're still behind on the bills. And any other job that pays as well as this one is going to be demanding and stressy."

What she doesn't say is that she actually enjoys this job. There's something powerful in marshaling her computer mojo to drill down to find highly relevant information in millions of pages of emails and badly scanned hard copy documents. Of finding tiny pockets of order in a sea of chaos.

Instead, she says, as she has every time this topic comes up, "If I hang on for a couple more weeks, we'll finally be current with all of the debt payment plans." It's been true every time she's said it; unexpected expenses keep popping up every week or so: repairs for the Jeep, a new washing machine when the old one conked out, Dawn needing all four wisdom teeth extracted.

It's also true that Willow could keep this job for the rest of this summer, and all the way into senior year, and still not get Buffy and Dawn on solid financial footing. The debts are like everything else this year: she could work on them for years and never come close to repaying what she owes.

Tara sighs, perhaps thinking about the upcoming dentist bills, and says, "All right. But you need to take better care of yourself."

"Okay," Willow says, wishing she could understand why Tara's so worked up about the demands of this job. Willow's been handling late-night crises since she was sixteen. If Tara thinks this is bad, she should have seen Willow in the last few weeks of junior year at Sunnydale High. Back then she'd balanced attending her own classes, tutoring Buffy in chemistry, teaching Miss Calendar's class, dating a werewolf, and in her copious free time, learning enough about the dark arts to successfully restore Angel's soul. (Though Tara might say that Willow was pushing herself too hard back then, too.)

But in the grand scheme of the relationship, Willow has no right to complain about feeling slighted by the way Tara talks to her, or Tara being over-protective of her, or really anything Tara ever does. She violated Tara's mind and trust in a truly unforgiveable way, twice, and Tara somehow managed to forgive her.

And Willow knows that there are limits to forgiveness. Oz forgave her for kissing Xander. But later, when she caught him with Veruca, he threw that back in her face, weaponizing her transgression against her. She doesn't want to ever reach Tara's limit of forgiveness.

* * *

After Willow takes a mid-morning nap, Tara takes her to the Sunnydale Arboretum. They find a bench under a jacaranda tree, facing the pond. Even in the shade, the heat wraps around them like a blanket. A bead of sweat trickles down Willow's shoulders and settles in the small of her back. She sits, staring out at the water, then at the purple flowers above them, waiting for Tara to say something.

Finally the waiting becomes unbearable. She asks, "Is there something you want me to do?"

Tara takes her hand. "Just enjoy the plants and recharge a little."

Willow watches Tara out of the corner of her eye. She's breathing in a slow, steady rhythm. Her expression of gentle serenity gives her face an otherworldly beauty.

Willow knows Tara wants her to connect with nature the way that she does-in a spiritual, earth-goddessy kind of way. But Willow's mind swirls with prosaic facts about their surroundings. There's a stand of redwoods across the pond; they're the state tree of California. Hummingbirds with bright red heads are staging aerial fights over the columbines. They're either Rufous or Anna's hummingbirds; it's hard to tell from this distance.

She breathes in, inhaling only the honey-sweet scent of jacaranda blossoms.

"It's nice here. Chock full of nature-y goodness." Her voice dies at the end of that inane sentence and she wishes she could take it back. She hates how hesitant she is around Tara. But it feels necessary.

She has spent a lot of time in the last few weeks trying to understand why Tara wants to be with her. When they'd first fallen in love, magic was inextricably linked to their courtship. Now that Willow's magic is gone, she's not sure what Tara sees in her.

It wasn't seeing Willow track down Warren and his invisibility ray with nothing more than hard work and brainpower, because Tara wasn't there for that.

It wasn't seeing Willow face down Amy and temptation with fierce determination, because Tara wasn't there for that.

Tara _did_ see Willow at Buffy's birthday party, when Willow was fragile and cringey in the face of Xander and Anya's pressure to do magic. Tara swooped into the fight all mama-bearish, because she thought Willow was too weak to handle the pressure on her own. Sure, later on Tara said something later about Willow holding up when things got bad. Willow had felt good about that for about five minutes. But then she realized that Tara's actions during the fight spoke louder than her words afterwards.

So maybe what Tara wants is for Willow to be uncertain and hesitant. Maybe for this relationship to work, one of them has to be the junior partner. And maybe that's the best thing for everyone. Willow has screwed up so many things this year by being over-confident. Now Tara's handed her a once-in-a lifetime second chance. She cannot screw that second chance up.

She stares out across the pond at the collection of bonsais. The tiny trees have always fascinated her; the mimicry of larger trees is accomplished solely by meticulous pruning.

That's a lesson she needs to take to heart. It was wrong to try to change Tara and other people with magic. But it's not wrong for Willow to change herself, with non-magical means. Isn't that what everyone always says, that the only person you can change is yourself?

She has already cut away the witchy part of herself. But it doesn't have to stop there. She can find a way to cut away the part that loves pushing herself to the limit, the part that doesn't commune with nature properly, and any other part of herself that Tara doesn't like. Then she can finally shape herself into the woman Tara wants her to be.

* * *

A/N:

Ramification is a term used to describe the branching structure of a bonsai created through repeated pruning.

Some dialogue taken from episodes Crush and Tabula Rasa.


End file.
